brilliant standards as the nations of the Mediterranean. When they
sailed on a warlike expedition, or when they celebrated a victory over
pirates, they covered their vessels with flags. The poet Benoît de
Sainte-More tells us that it was in this fashion, covered with seven
hundred banners of different colours, that Rollo brought his fleet
back up the Seine to Meulan. The Middle Ages made use of all kinds
of fanciful decorations for their vessels; during the Renaissance,
this taste was renewed and was an improvement both upon the customs
of antiquity, whence it drew its inspirations, and on those of the
thirteenth century, which it seemed anxious to forget (Fig. 95). “A
galley,” says the learned M. Jal, “was in those days a species of
jewel, and was handed over for embellishment to the hands of genius as
a piece of metal was given to Benvenuto Cellini.” Sculptors, painters,
and poets combined their talents to adorn a ship’s stern. No more
striking example of this artistic refinement in naval ornamentation
could be well quoted than that of the Spanish galley which was
constructed in 1568 by order of Philip II. for his brother, Don Juan
of Austria, to whom he had confided the command of the fleet intended
to fight the barbarous Moorish States of Africa. The vessel’s cutwater
was painted white and emblazoned with the royal arms of Spain, and with
the personal ones of Don Juan. The prince being a Knight of the Golden
Fleece, and the adventurous expedition on which he was bound being
likely to be attended with as many perils as that of the Argonauts,
the history of Jason and of the good ship Argo was represented in
coloured sculpture on the stern above the rudder. This pictured poem
was accompanied with four symbolical statues--Prudence, Temperance,
Power, and Justice, above which floated angels carrying the symbols of
the theological virtues. On one side of the poop might be seen Mars the
Avenger, Mercury the Eloquent, and Ulysses stopping his ears against
the seductions of the Sirens; on the other, Pallas, Alexander the
Great, Argus, and Diana. Between these were inserted pictures, which
conveyed either a moral lesson for the benefit of the young admiral, or
a delicate eulogium on Charles V., his father, or on Philip II., his
brother. All these emblems were _chefs-d’œuvre_ of drawing and
sculpture, which the brilliancy of their gold, azure, and vermilion
settings tended to enhance.
[Illustration: Fig. 95.--Man-of-War of the Sixteenth
Century.--Drawn by William Barendsz and engraved by Visscher,
from the Collection of Engravings in the National Library of
Paris.]
A noticeable incident in the above description is its incongruous
mixture of Christian and Pagan allegories. It bears witness to the
anti-religious tendency of the school of thought of the Renaissance,
and is a faithful reflection of the alteration in custom and belief.
In the Middle Ages, sailors, and indeed all classes of society,
were imbued with a strong spirit of faith, tinged, however, with
a great deal of superstition. As in our day, they had a sincere
belief in Providence, and professed great devotion to the Virgin;
in seasons of peril they invoked those saints who were supposed
to take special interests in ships and sailors; but, in spite of
their natural reverence for religion, they allowed themselves to be
influenced by childish superstition, and confused the promptings of
their orthodox faith with all kinds of vain imaginings. Sailors have
ever been superstitious; their credulous brains are the parents of
all the fantastic beings and animals that they persuade themselves
they have seen in their wanderings, and with which they have peopled
the mysterious depths of the ocean. The sirens of antiquity, the
monsters of Scylla and Charybdis, have been far surpassed by modern
legendary creations, such as the _kraken_, a gigantic mass of
pulp, which attacked and dragged down the largest ships; the _bishop
fish_, which, mitre on head, blessed and then devoured shipwrecked
mariners; the _black hand_, which, even in the days of Columbus,
was depicted on the map as marking the entrance to the _sunless
ocean_; and the numerous troops of hideous demons, one of whom,
in the sight of the whole French fleet of Crusaders on their way to
attack the island of Mitylene, in the reign of Louis XII., clutched and
swallowed up a profligate sailor, who, over his dice, had “blasphemed
and defied the Holy Virgin.”
Blasphemy was by no means uncommon among seamen; in spite of the laws
of the Church and the regulations of the Admiralty, they insisted on
using the most frightful oaths; they swore continually by bread, by
wine, and by salt, meaning thereby the very principles of life itself,
and by their soul--an oath which was forbidden on pain of the severest
punishment. Yet the mariners of the Middle Ages had strong reasons
for avoiding open blasphemy, for, an offence against Heaven being
considered far more criminal than any injury to mankind, a blasphemer
was liable to fine, to the cat, and to death itself. Even in the
thirteenth century the Danish code inflicted a comparatively moderate
punishment on a thief; it shaved his head, tarred and feathered him,
and made him run the gauntlet of the whole crew, after which it
contented itself with dismissing him from his ship.
[Illustration: Fig. 96.--Seal of La Rochelle (1437).]
THE CRUSADES.
Arab Conquest of the Holy Land.--Swarm of Pilgrims in the
Year 1000.--Turkish Invasion of Judea.--Persecution of the
Christians.--Pope Silvester II.--Expedition of the Pisans
and the Genoese.--Peter the Hermit.--Letter from Simeon the
Patriarch to Pope Urban II.--First Crusade.--Expedition of
“Gautier sans Avoir.”--Godefroy de Bouillon.--The Kingdom of
Jerusalem.--Second Crusade.--St. Bernard.--Third Crusade: Philip
Augustus and Richard Cœur de Lion.--Fourth Crusade.--Fifth
and Sixth Crusades.--Louis IX. turns Crusader.--Seventh
Crusade.--St. Louis taken Prisoner.--Eighth and last
Crusade.--Death of St. Louis.--Results of the Crusades.
“Jerusalem,” says Jacques de Vitry, Bishop of Ptolemais in the
thirteenth century, and one of the most eloquent historians of the
Crusades, “Jerusalem is the city of cities, the saint of saints, the
queen of nations, and the princess of provinces. She is situated in the
centre of the world, in the middle of the earth, so that all men may
turn their steps towards her; she is the patrimony of the patriarchs,
the muse of the prophets, the mistress of the apostles, the cradle of
our salvation, the home of our Lord, and the mother of the faith, as
Rome is the mother of the faithful. She is chosen and hallowed by the
Almighty, who placed his feet upon her, honoured by the angels, and
visited by all the nations of the earth.” A poet of the same period
declares, in a burst of fervent inspiration: “She attracts the faithful
as the magnet attracts the steel, as the sheep attracts the lamb with
the milk of its teats, as the sea attracts the river to which it has
given birth.”
Under the influence of this belief it is easy to understand the
powerful interest which, in the eyes of the whole Christian world, was
attached to a corner of the globe so marked with the impress of the
Almighty, and the object of so much veneration.
Since the conversion of Constantine I., which so gloriously signalized
the triumph of the cross, and while the ostentatious but feeble
successors of that great emperor were preparing the decline of the
empire of Byzantium, Jerusalem had frequently been forced to submit to
infidel profanations, and the Western Christians, in their visits to
the holy places, had, in consequence, many times encountered painful
and almost insurmountable obstacles.
In the seventh century, the conquest of Palestine by the Arabs or
Saracens, attracted by fanaticism to the banner of Mahomet’s immediate
successors, had occasioned the most painful, if not the first of these
terrible trials to Christendom. Already pilgrims, on their return from
the Holy Land, had related to the dismayed West the sacrileges of
which they had been the witnesses, and the annoyances of which they
themselves had been the victims. Their dismal recitals represented
the Christian population of Judea as reduced to a species of slavery,
groaning under heavy tribute, clad in a degrading livery, forbidden
to use the language of their conquerors, banished from their temples,
now transformed into mosques, and obliged to conceal every external
emblem of their religion, which they were no longer allowed publicly to
practise.
But a gentler rule succeeded these hardships, thanks to the internal
dissensions of the Mussulmans, who, in the midst of their fratricidal
struggles, forgot to persecute the Christians; thanks also to the
policy of the famous Haroun-al-Raschid and his children, who, being
constantly at war with the emperors of Constantinople, dreaded lest the
Eastern Christians should summon the Western to their assistance, and,
consequently, were always showering on the latter every possible mark
of deference, of kindness, and of consideration.
Later, when the empire of Haroun-al-Raschid had fallen into decay,
one of Constantine’s successors, John I., surnamed Zimisces (970),
attempted to accomplish the freedom of the Holy Land, and had nearly
succeeded, when death struck down the leader of the Christian army in a
battle with the Arabs, and with him was destroyed the last hope of the
faithful, who soon found themselves delivered over to the horrors of a
terrible persecution. “It is impossible to put on record all the evils
they suffered,” says William of Tyre, in his great history of the holy
war.
[Illustration: Fig. 97.--Façade of the Church of the Holy
Sepulchre, Jerusalem, founded in 326 by the Emperor Constantine,
and restored by the Crusaders in 1099 (present condition, from a
Photograph).]
Towards the close of the tenth century, a false interpretation of a
passage in the Gospels, according to which the end of the world and the
second coming of Jesus Christ in Judea had been fixed for the year one
thousand, had struck all Christendom with stupor and affright. “The
end of the world being at hand,” were the opening words of all deeds
and contracts; and the vanities of the world being forgotten in the
near approach of the “supreme and inevitable catastrophe,” every one
was anxious to start for the Holy Land, in the hope of being present
at the coming of the Saviour, and of finding there pardon for their
sins, a peaceful death, and the salvation of his soul. The immense
crowd of pilgrims, according to another historian of the Crusades,
Glaber the monk, was far greater than religious devotion alone could
possibly account for. The first to come were the poor and the working
classes, and then counts, barons, and princes, who no longer attached
any value to the possessions of this world. And further, as if the
miraculous influence of this grand religious manifestation had inspired
the infidels themselves with admiration and awe, the cruelties and
the persecutions inflicted upon the Christians in Palestine suddenly
ceased. When the dreaded epoch had passed away, and no perceptible
disturbance had occurred in the laws of the universe, when each
successive day had lessened the fears and increased the courage of the
Western Church, the Holy Land remained open to pilgrims, who came in
swarms to thank the Lord Jesus Christ for having a second time saved
the world.
But all this was merely a kind of tacit truce granted to the children
of Christ by the unbelievers, who had sworn to destroy the religion
of the cross, and to establish in its place the creed of Mohamet. The
East, moreover, was about to change masters. The Turks, an Asiatic
nomadic people, sprung from the countries beyond the Oxus, had
conquered Persia, and had thence borne their triumphant arms towards
Syria and the banks of the Nile. This rapid conquest included Judea,
and was signalized by horrible excesses. No quarter was given either to
the followers of Moses, to those of Jesus, or to the disciples of the
Prophet. The same blow fell upon the Jewish synagogues, the Mussulman
mosques, and the Catholic churches. Jerusalem was steeped in blood.
Deprived of their property, groaning under a bitter and humiliating
yoke, says a contemporary historian, the Christians suffered as they
had never suffered before.
Asia Minor, the land generally crossed by the pilgrims on their way to
Jerusalem, was also in the power of the Turks. In the principal towns,
Nicea, Tarsus, Antioch, Edessa, &c., whose names are inseparable from
the glorious memories of the first centuries of the Church, neither the
Greek nor the Roman Catholic ritual could be publicly celebrated. The
precepts of the Koran were the only ones that were rigorously observed;
and Christians everywhere experienced from the Mohammedans the same
injustice, the same annoyances, and the same hardships.
The accounts of these persecutions, which seemed intended to utterly
annihilate the faith of the cross, filled the hearts of the faithful
with gloom and anger. The day was already fast approaching when the
groans and complaints that reached them from the Holy Land were to
rouse and arm the nations of the West for the deliverance of Christ’s
tomb, and the formidable struggle, soon to take place between the
Christian and the Moslem--a struggle fated to last for two hundred
years with alternate successes and reverses on either side--was
destined to decide the future of European civilisation.
So far back as the commencement of the eleventh century, Gerbert,
a French monk, one of the most remarkable men of his time, who had
succeeded to the papacy as Silvester II., attempted, under the
influence of the impressions he had brought back from a pilgrimage
to Jerusalem, to make a fresh appeal to Christendom against the
persecutions he had witnessed in the East. Roused by his summons, an
expedition of Pisans, of Genoese, and of the subjects of the King of
Arles, had put to sea and disembarked on the coasts of Syria, where it
inflicted a certain amount of injury on the cruel votaries of Islamism;
without, however, being able to penetrate very far inland, but not
without influencing to some extent the fate of the inhabitants of
Palestine.
In fact, persecution for the time ceased, or at any rate was sensibly
diminished, and it was not until half a century later that a fresh
crusading appeal rang through Christendom. This time the cry of sorrow
and indignation was uttered by Pope Gregory VII., that illustrious
pontiff whose ardent and resolute nature, in the midst of the universal
disorder and disorganization of government and society, seemed to have
a divine mission to fulfil in settling upon an indestructible basis the
supreme authority of the Church. “The miseries suffered by the Eastern
Christians,” he wrote, “have so stirred up my heart that I almost long
for death, and I would rather expose my life in delivering the holy
places than reign over the universe. Come, sons of Christ, and you will
find me at your head!”
Such words as these at such an epoch necessarily rekindled faith and
hope in every heart that received them. Fifty thousand Christians
bound themselves by an oath to follow the successor of St. Peter to
Constantinople, when the Emperor Michael Ducas promised to put an end
to the dissensions that had so long separated the Greek from the Latin
Church, and to Jerusalem, where the standard of Christ, supported by
heroic hands and hearts, could not fail soon to replace the standard
of the Prophet. Rumours were rife in Europe that a part of Asia was
already christianised, and that Prester-John, a powerful sovereign
of Tartary (Figs. 98 and 99), had forced his subjects to adopt the
precepts of the Gospel.
[Illustration:
Fig 98.--Prester-John, Chief of a Christian Tribe in Tartary.
Fig. 99.--Prester-John’s Page.
From Cesare Vecelli’s “Degli Habiti Antichi e Moderni:” 8vo,
Venice, 1560.]
But the political struggles which Gregory VII. had to sustain against
the princes of the West, and the refusal of the King of Germany,
Henry IV., to grant him the assistance he had demanded, prevented him
from undertaking the sacred expedition which was to have crowned his
apostolic work. Victor III., his successor, inspired by his example,
continued to preach the Holy War against the infidels. The latter not
only manifested throughout the entire East their implacable hatred
to the Christian race, but, having founded large settlements on the
shores of Africa, they infested the seas, endangered the security
of all maritime trading, ceaselessly pillaged the coasts of Italy,
ravaged the greater part of Spain, and seemed to be within very little
of making Europe a tributary of Islam. But if Victor III. was unable
to give birth to a real crusade, he at least succeeded in persuading
the Italians to take up arms. An army of Pisans and Genoese landed
in Africa (1087), gave battle to the Saracens, killed more than a
hundred thousand of them, took and sacked two of their towns, and
returned victorious with an immense booty, which they devoted to the
embellishment of the churches of Genoa and of Pisa. But this daring
enterprise, in spite of its important results, is not mentioned by
any of the historians of the Crusades, although in every respect it
had the characteristics of a holy war. This appears to prove that its
guiding principle was by no means entirely a religious one, but was one
bound up with many more material interests, particularly with that of
Italian commerce, which had suffered so much from African piracy that
it naturally wished at any price to punish the accursed race from which
it sprung.
The successor of Victor III. was Urban II., a pontiff of French
extraction, who, following up the policy of his predecessors,
endeavoured with all his influence to stir up the Christians against
the infidels. But the Almighty often confides the execution of his
most important designs to the hands of the humblest, and the honour
of initiating the Crusades was not reserved for the occupant of the
chair of St. Peter. It was destined to fall to the lot of a humble
pilgrim, who, as the learned historian of these events tells us, was
inspired only by his zeal, and whose only influence was the force of
his character and his genius. This humble pilgrim was Peter of Acheris,
better known as Peter the Hermit. Descended from a noble family of
Picardy, but ungainly in body and short of stature, he had vainly
sought happiness and peace in the most opposite conditions of society.
At first he embraced the profession of arms, then he gave himself
up to literature, then he married, and being soon left a widower, he
entered into holy orders. Everywhere, however, he met with nothing but
bitterness and deception. Having become at last, to use the expression
of William of Tyre, “hermit both in deed and in name,” he sought in
solitude, in fasting, and in prayer to forget the empty vanities of the
world, and it was no doubt with a last hope of giving some practical
effect to his fervent but barren devotion that he undertook his pious
pilgrimage to Jerusalem.
His habits of meditation and prayer had infused a burning ardour and
an enlightenment into his soul. When he found himself on the very
soil that had been pressed by the Saviour’s feet, when he witnessed
the hardships and the humiliations inflicted on the worshippers of
Christ by the infidels, when, above all, he heard the lamentations
of the venerable Simeon, the patriarch of Jerusalem, and had wept
with him over the terrible trials of the Eastern Church, indignation,
grief, piety, and faith awoke in his heart the feeling that he must
at all hazards devote his life to a special vocation. He resolved to
devote himself to the protection of his brethren in Christ, and to the
deliverance of the holy places.
One day, as he was secretly praying in front of the Holy Sepulchre,
he heard a voice saying, “Peter, arise! go forth and announce the
tribulation of my people; it is time that my servants be succoured
and my holy places delivered.” Under the influence of this heavenly
command, the poor pilgrim, convinced that he was henceforward chosen
by the divine will, determined to allow himself no rest till the holy
mission, with which Christ himself had entrusted him, had been fully
and faithfully accomplished. He left Palestine with letters from the
patriarch Simeon to the Pope; he crossed the sea, hurried to Rome,
and threw himself at the feet of Urban II., who, listening to the
pathetic and eloquent language of the poor pilgrim, fancied that he was
addressed by some inspired prophet, and entrusted him with the mission
of summoning the nations to the holy war (Fig. 100).
Peter the Hermit, says the historian whose account we are following,
left Italy, crossed the Alps, and wandered over France and a great
part of Europe, infusing into all the burning zeal with which he was
filled. He journeyed on a mule, a crucifix in his hand, his feet bare,
his head uncovered, his body girdled with a thick cord, and clad in a
long frock and mantle of the commonest, coarsest stuff. His peculiar
garments excited the curiosity of the people, while the austerity
of his life, his charity, and the morality he inculcated, made them
reverence him as a saint. He wandered in this guise from town to town,
from province to province, stirring up the courage of some and the
piety of others; sometimes he addressed them from church pulpits,
sometimes in the highways and public places. His eloquence was keen and
vigorous, full of vehement appeals that carried away the multitudes who
listened to him. He recalled to their memories the profanation of the
holy places, and the Christian blood that had poured in rivers down the
streets of Jerusalem; he called on Heaven, the saints, and the angels,
whose testimony he invoked as to the truth of his statements; he
appealed to them by the holy hill of Sion, by the heights of Calvary,
and by the mount of Olives, whose slopes he declared were ringing with
groans and lamentations. When words failed him to further depict the
miseries of the faithful in the far East, he showed them the crucifix
which he always carried about him, and, beating his breast, burst into
passionate tears.
[Illustration: Fig. 100.--Peter the Hermit delivering the Message
of Simeon, Patriarch of Jerusalem, to Pope Urban II.--From
a Coloured Drawing by Germain Picavet in the “Histoire des
Croisades,” a Manuscript of the Fifteenth Century (Burgundian
Library, Brussels).]
The populace everywhere crowded around him. The preacher of the holy
war was received as the special envoy of the Almighty. To be allowed
to touch his clothes was considered an inestimable privilege, the hair
even of the mule he bestrode was prized and preserved as a relic. The
tones of his voice hushed domestic strife, forced the rich to succour
the needy, and the profligate to slink ashamed away. His austerities
and his miracles, his discourses and his exhortations, were repeated
to those who had not been fortunate enough to witness the former or
to hear the latter. As his hearers realised the fact that Jerusalem,
Holy Jerusalem, was in the power of the infidel, the emotions of pity
and the desire for vengeance were kindled within them. Every voice was
lifted up to beseech God to restore to his keeping his once-beloved
city. Some proffered their wealth, others their prayers, and all their
life, to deliver the holy places.
Everything in Europe was ready for the great expedition; every heart
beat high and every voice re-echoed the solemn hope so ardently and so
persistently instilled by Peter the Hermit. Nothing now was wanted but
to crown the work so far accomplished, and some watchword that would
strike home to every heart, and raise, amidst the pious and countless
hosts of the Crusaders, some one central banner around which they could
all unite and rally. To this end Urban convoked a council on the very
spot in that land of the Franks in which he had been born, a land which
had always been foremost to set a noble example to surrounding nations.
The council assembled in Clermont, a town in Auvergne, scarcely large
enough to contain the crowd of illustrious personages that soon flocked
thither, “in such numbers,” says the French chronicler, William
Aubert, “that, towards the middle of November, in the year 1096, the
neighbouring towns and villages were so full of strangers that many
were obliged to pitch their tents in the midst of the fields and
meadows, although the season was extremely cold.”